Warm It Up: New Waste Heat Recovery Project Comes Online
Sydney, Australia - 15 February, 2021- With a production capacity of 15 million tons of raw of mine coal per year, Tashan Coal Mine of Jinneng Holding, located in Datong, Shanxi Province, China, is a massive underground mining operation that also consumes a significant amount of energy to keep its facilities warm in the cold winter. Tashan actually used to operate, not surprisingly, a large coal-burned boiler system to heat the mine shafts and surface facilities. Recently, however, the boiler has been replaced by a newly installed high efficiency waste heat recovery system provided by SMEET, a DADI company focusing on waste heat recovery solutions.
The SMEET waste heat recovery system at Tashan collects the “hidden” energy in the mine’s ventilation return air and exhaust air from the large air compressors operated by the mine. These two waste air flows are drawn by the heat extraction units which direct the air to go through series of heat pumps to produce hot air. The hot air is then used for heating the mine shafts and surface facilities.
"There are 28 SMEET deep-enthalpy exhaust air heat extractors above the return air shaft. These units can extract the residual heat in the ventilation return air between 10°C (50 F) and -15°C (5 F) and transmit the heat through 5 direct-cooled heat pumps and 16 mine shaft heaters. Hot air of about 20°C (68 F) is delivered to the mine shaft to keep the shaft insulated and warm," explained Jihua Meng, mine ventilation engineering at Tashan.
“All 13 air compressors at the mine are part of the waste heat recovery project as well,” added Gong Wang, mine ventilation superintendent. “By doing this, not only does it provide a clean heating source, in the meantime, air production of the compressors is increased by 10%~15%. Our air compressor maintenance cost is going down since the units are now running at a lower temperature. We expect the service life of the air compressors to be extended by 5 to 8 years.”
The Tashan waste heat recovery project was completed within just three months, and operating cost of the system is only one-third of that of the traditional boiler previously used by the mine, resulting in an estimated annual savings of more than 10 million RMB (USD $1.5 Million). The SMEET system also features some smart technologies, for example, automatic adjusting the air compressors to accommodate load fluctuations, unmanned operation, automatic system control plan, making it a green and smart system. For more information on the SMEET waste heat recovery technology, please visit here.
About DADI Engineering
DADI Engineering is a leading vertically integrated EPCM firm serving the mining and mineral processing industries. DADI’s business includes mine survey & development, coal processing EPCM projects, processing equipment manufacturing, green mining solutions, mine waste heat recovery & smart mining and mineral processing technologies. DADI has operations in Australia, China, Africa and the United States, and we work with some of the largest mining companies in the world such as Anglo American, BHP, Glencore, Rio Tinto, Shenhua Energy, Peabody Energy, Vale, Yancoal, etc. For more information about DADI, please visit www.dadieng.com.au
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